Psychedelic Language is the title of a presentation given by Scott Santoro of Worksight for the Hood Museum of Art’s exhibit at Dartmouth College. The title of the exhibit was "High Society, Psychedelic Rock Posters of Haight-Ashbury" and the presentation discussed the poster designs as a product of the social climate and in relation to the commercial attitude of the time."

In April of 2002, the Hood Museum of Art, at Dartmouth, asked me to speak, as a graphic designer, about their exhibit of Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom Psychedelic posters. I didn’t know much about the work other than I always thought the posters were incredibly creative, but now that I understand where they were “coming from” and how to place them in today’s context, I’m better able to enjoy and appreciate these posters. Maybe, after this lecture, you’ll feel the same way.

This is a poster by Victor Moscoso that he designed in a couple of days which was the case with many of these posters. Moscoso said that the face was simply copied out of a magazine, and the type quickly rendered by first penciling horizontal and vertical lines to form each letter block, then each letter’s counter added to form instant type.

This is another colorful, and with blacklight, intense poster by Bob Schnepf. But before I go deeper into the formal qualities that make up this visual language, I’d like to explain why these posters look the way they look from a social and cultural perspective.

Besides buying books on the subject of rock posters, I visited antique stores and second hand shops to see what residue I might find from the Psychedelic era. I found this Look magazine from November of 1967 which featured a story about Psychedelic body painting.

November was only three months after “The Summer of Love,” which tells me that the Psychedelic language had become a mainstream style and fashion practically overnight. I found a few Polish poster submissions in a late 60s design annual that was very Psychedelic which leads me to believe that the style had even worked its way through the Iron Curtain.

Someone that we used to read up on in design grad school, French Post-Structuralist Roland Barthe, made a great quote that helps define this type of general style or fashion. He said “Style is an organized network of obsessions.” And clearly, Psychedelia was an organized network of obsessions.

It centered around the Haight Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, and the hippies (as they were called), that lived there. They were the muse of all this creative activity, and hippy obsessions developed into an organized network, or general style. They collected and wore the ornamented stuff that no one else wanted—stuff their parents had thrown out in the ’50s. And they lived in those “big, ugly” Victorian houses that no one else wanted to live in. It was true in Detroit and Chicago as well. The American downtowns of that era either tore down or removed layers of ornamentation and replaced it with second-generation international style—minimal, and ahistoric; all for the sake of appearing “modern.” So the hippies embracing of past styles, and the adopting of an anti-modern aesthetic seems to have been an act of defiance. The poster artists either empathized or shared these obsessions, and brought them into the overall framework of the Psychedelic poster, which functioned as announcements, but with an undeniable layer of reaction and rebellion.

Here’s an ad from the Look magazine issue. It says “’68 Buick. Now we’re talking your language.” If I were to visually read what was being said, I might say crew-cut complacency, car as status symbol, and a basic consistency with the surge of economic growth in America. But it wasn’t the language of the hippies, who rejected this lifestyle and language.

I got lucky with this Look magazine. The next page began an article about the Vietnam War which to me gave serious credence to any counter-culture movement. If you consider the simple act of growing long hair in this context, then it’s easy to understand how it was a form of protest to the military crew-cut. I suppose I could also find “Flower power,” with its bright vocabulary of colors, as a form of protest to fatigues and gray flannel suits. I think the wide flowered ties and shirts helped spawn the back-to-nature movement of the 70s.